Burgeoning liminality: artistic interventions in visual culture from Northern Ireland post-2016 EU referendum.

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My research will analyse how artistic collectives in Northern Ireland are creating spaces and practiceswhere solutions to the tensions reignited by Brexit can be imagined and trialled. I contend that artisticcollectives should be analysed as virtual spaces wherein communities can engage in prototyping radicalpublic discourses which oppose the reignition of historic political tensions in NI.It has become clear that artist-led organisations are having thoughtful, nuanced engagement withdifficult conversations which have not been possible in political discourse because of sectarianantagonism. The success of 2021 Turner Prize-winning Array Collective raises the question of socialreform through the lens of collaborative action, activism, collectivity, and artistic practice.I will take Mark Fisher's text "Acid Communism" (2018) as a theoretical departure point to argue that, byrecalling radical forms of collectivity from the '60s social revolution, the neoliberal hegemony can becontested through a process of 'unforgetting'. This would preposition NI's '68 , for example, convergingwith the post-Brexit social environment. The 'acid' of acid communism, then, implies a divergent and redirectingsocial imaginary recognising that "the material conditions for such a revolution are more inplace in the twenty-first century than they were [in the '60s]" (Fisher, 2018).In remembering such 'lost' aspirations of the public, Fisher returns to Herbert Marcuse for his "AestheticDimension" (1977) in which the critical value of the arts is located in its detachment from, and discontenttowards, the hegemonic reality. This understanding of artistic practice then extends to Antonio Gramsci's'organic' intellectual (1971) as a social agent functioning with a counter-hegemonic, organisational capacity.This leads me to the following questions:1) What evidence of 'acid communist' practice can be extrapolated from post-Brexit collective artpractices in NI?2) How are artists trialling collective, radical approaches that can oppose hegemonic narratives?3) How does NI's contested history impact contemporary artist-led organisations and their collectivepractices?These questions will guide me to pursue timely and relevant investigations into the cultural influence ofartist-led organisations, as the current stagnation of devolved government in NI causes wider publicdiscontent. Not since events such as the 1968 NI civil rights movement or 1998 Good Friday Agreementhave such conditions arisen in public discourse. The only divergence being that NI's '68 moment wassubsequently marginalised by the atrocities of the Troubles. My third proposed supervisor, Prof ChrisReynolds, recommends that the contemporary context "provides the grounds for a recalibration of thememory of this time" (2018).Accordingly my research will offer an innovative transdisciplinary approach between visual culture andwider cultural studies. The research will offer contributions to cultural policy and public engagementthrough curatorial outputs, exhibitions, workshops, symposia, and semi-structured interviews, whereviable meeting points will be facilitated for broader engagement with my findings. My pursuit ofplacement at Derry/Londonderry's Void Gallery will engage with the theoretical nature of this researchproject on a public level.Research and development of draft chapters will take place across three full years with redrafting,manuscript finalisation, and thesis submission at Year 4.Year 1 will see research into artist-led organisations including Array Collective, Catalyst Arts, and PlatformArts; examining their organisational structure, arts programming, public engagement, and artistrepresentation through the 'acid communist' methodology, culminating in two draft chapters.Year 2 will see research conducted through semi-structured interviews with representatives ofaforementioned organisations including co-dir